John Jennings and Damian Duffy’s bookBlack Comix delves into a subculture within a subculture. A showcase of recent work by African-American comics creators, it’s generally evangelical in tone, but also functions as a frontal assault on the stereotype of the comic-book writer/artist as a white male nerd with a rich fantasy life in which he’s Deadpool. There’s some rote ’roid-case superhero stuff in the book, but there’s also a ton of striking, original work by unjustly unfamous talent; the text accompanying the images traces black comic-book art’s links to manga, hip-hop and graffiti. It’s a project that feels both long overdue and right on time—check out the comment thread on any comic-book fan-site story about Donald Glover angling for the role of Spider-Man if you don’t think the idea of African-American superheroes isn’t still a locus of racial striving and resentment. We talked to Duffy and Jennings about economic populism, the checkered career of jive-talking Marvel superhero Luke Cage, and why there’s never been a good comic book about the Wu-Tang Clan.

GQ: In one of the essays in your book, the artist Turtel Onli asks, "Why is your comic book collection not as black as your music collection?" In a lot of ways, it seems like the goal of the book is to make readers ask themselves that same question. So what’s the answer? Are there fewer comic books aimed at black readers because—either because of institutional racism, or any number of other reasons—there just aren’t as many black comics creators?

DAMIAN DUFFY: Overwhelmingly, yeah, that’s probably true. But it’s not totally correct—because there were black artists doing comics back in the day. George Herriman was probably black. He was like the one person of color in the Masters of American Comics show. There’s some debate about it, but they think he was passing for white, but was actually African-American.

JOHN JENNINGS: He was from Louisiana. The way they looked at race was a bit different.

DD: Yeah—he was sort of Creole. But he’s been claimed as a black artist. In his book Mumbo Jumbo, at the start, Ishmael Reed said Herriman was black, and that sort of caught on as a political statement—like, this great American artist was black.

**I never knew that. And I guess maybe the fact I never knew that says something about why a book like this is necessary. **

DD: Turtel put it really well—race is something that doesn’t get looked at a lot in comics culture. It’s invisible in comics culture, and it’s weird that it still is. Comics are way behind the curve.

JJ: I read an interesting interview with Trevor Von Eeden, who co-created Black Lightning, talking about different aspects of how African American creators were treated in the 60s and 70s by the big comic book companies, the "black books" stereotyping that went on, and the limits on how black artists were allowed to express themselves in that particular arena.

Also, that was a time when artists and creators in general were being treated pretty badly by the industry, which I assume made it even harder.

DD: I think somebody like E. Simms Campbell— he was a black artist who did stuff for the New Yorker, I think he was treated all right. Or he was treated differently, as the New Yorker sort of comic strip artist, where you’re like a class above lowly comic book artists, so you’re treated well. I think a lot of black comics artists were marginalized to such an extent that that’s why you don’t know about them now. They were sort of kept out of the limelight. It’s not like they had a black artist drawing Superman. They’d be doing, like, backup stories.

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**The book’s focus is on creators who’ve emerged during the last few years. You don’t go back to black creators like Denys Cowan or Von Eeden, or Billy Graham, who wrote and drew a lot of the Black Panther stuff. Was that older stuff off-limits to you because you couldn’t get the rights? **

DD: That was a big part of it. But we also felt like, with our previous projects, we’d already looked back a lot, and we wanted to do something that looked forward. The book is sort of an entry point into contemporary black comics culture. You can get the book, and if you see an artist you like, all their information’s in there, and you can go and see other stuff they’ve done. It’s meant to be a starting point to open up peoples’ perceptions about what sort of work is out there, what kind of stuff you can read, and what comics can do.

**It seems like there was a lot of economically-motivated progressivism in early superhero comics—they’d introduce a black character like Black Panther because they thought diversifying the line would be good for sales. **

DD: Definitely. You can see that with Luke Cage, too—he was obviously created just because blaxploitation was popular.

JJ: I think Cage kind of was the black audience in the Marvel Universe for a while. The different incarnations mirrored how black people were being portrayed in media. And there’s stuff like Brother Voodoo, too. And even characters like Iron Fist, or Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu—that’s them capitalizing on all those B-movie stereotypes.

They were trying to grab on to that huge audience that existed for kung-fu movies, which was in large part a black audience.

DD: Yeah. I just read an article about some of the 1960s war comics, that Joe Kubert drew, the interview was him and they were asking, because there were a couple where he brought a black character into Easy Company, Sgt. Rock’s company, and the interviewer was asking him "Why did you do that?" And he said it was really just a sales thing in order to appeal to more readers.

JJ: Yeah—Gravedigger, who was a black soldier who was attached to the funerary detail or what have you, and he just became his own character. Gravedigger was awesome.

So there’s always a profit motive when they introduce these kinds of books—but then, when they don’t last, it’s for the same reason, they don’t sell. Why is there a ceiling on how well a comic with a black protagonist can do?

DD: I really think it’s a characteristic of the direct market. The direct market is completely insular—it just sort of feeds this one particular demographic, the 20s-to-50s white male who’s been reading this stuff since the ’70s. And they just want to see the same thing over and over. There was that essay recently—

Right—Chris Sims’ essay "The Racial Politics of Regressive Storytelling," about how DC Comics keeps creating these non-white versions of its heroes—a black guy becomes the new Firestorm, an Asian guy takes up the mantle of The Atom—only to kill them off or marginalize them in order to restore the characters to their "classic" incarnation, which always means putting a white guy back in the suit.

DD: I think that’s a characteristic of the direct market, too. Those are the characters that their fan base, or their demographic, the people who go to comic shops every Wednesday for the new books—that’s what they’re interested in. That nostalgia. So I think part of the reason they do that is because they have to. The reason there’s this "black books don’t sell" stereotype in the direct market is that the direct-market audience is, by and large, still interested in the books they read when they were kids, and when they were kids, it wasn’t even socially acceptable to have black characters.

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JJ: Exactly. It’s hard to bust into institutions, whether it’s the institution of the superhero or the institution of the direct market. It just seems like institutions are really good at not changing. They’re awesome at not changing.

DD: Well, they change, but it’s at the speed of erosion.

The best response I read to that essay was someone pointing out that yeah, okay, there’s X number of people who read Green Lantern the comic, where he’s a white guy, but there are a million kids who’ve grown up thinking Green Lantern is black, because of John Stewart, the black Green Lantern, from the Justice League TV show. So their idea of Green Lantern isn’t a guy who looks like Ryan Reynolds.

JJ: That’s a really good point. Today’s kids really aren’t reading comics. They’re seeing these representations in video games, and movies, and animated shows, and things of that nature. You have like a ton of kids who are absolutely in love with Spider-man but have never picked up a Spider-man comic.

DD: Yeah, that was good. I wish they’d do a John Stewart Green Lantern movie. That would make a lot more sense. That was one of the things that essay talked about—they cancelled the Blue Beetle series [in which Hispanic teenager Jamie Reyes assumed the Blue Beetle identity] right when the Blue Beetle character showed up on [Cartoon Network’s Batman team-up show] The Brave and the Bold.

JJ: I didn’t even realize that. Seriously? That’s crazy.

DD: It’s bizarre, right? There’s this disconnect between the comics and the rest of it.

JJ: It’s like, "Here’s my hand. Let me chop it off."

DD: Exactly. The corporate [comics] companies are so entrenched in that direct market, which is so shortsighted and myopic. But if you look at bookstores and libraries and stuff, it’s all Japanese comics. And younger readers all gravitate towards Japanese comics because they’re actually more diverse, they have more topics. They have stuff that girls might actually be interested in. Which is crazy, because girls can’t read comics! That was the mentality in the direct market forever—girls don’t read comics. They’re unable to read comics. So, yeah, I do think the regressive storytelling thing, with characters of color being killed off, is a symptom of that larger issue—of the market just being so myopic and small and unwilling to experiment. And again, I understand. From the comic-book shop owner’s point of view—their profit margin is super slim right now, and they don’t have a lot of room to maneuver and a lot of room to order from the back of the catalogue and stuff. But at the same time, come on—with all these movies, you must be able to do something.

JJ: And it’s also just the nature of comics. There’s a reason why superheroes are always the same age, right? They’re not supposed to go anywhere, they’re supposed to be that guy forever, you know? Look at what they did with Spider-Man, where they totally undid his marriage to Mary Jane.

So is that the solution? Different distribution channels?

DD: Yeah, I think that’s part of it. Bookstores and libraries having more graphic novels and comic books available sort of feeds into that part of it, and breeds a broader audience.

I’m assuming that when the focus of comics retail shifted from the spinner rack at the drugstore to the dedicated comic-book specialty shop, that changed the demographic of who was reading them, because if you were a kid and you didn’t have a comic store in your neighborhood, you were screwed.

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JJ: The access to comics definitely changed. Y’know, I grew up in a very very rural, agrarian Mississippi town. When I was growing up, reading comics, I would go to—I think it was called Stop and Go, it was just like a little gas station/Quik Stop kind of thing, and they would have the magazine rack, and the spinner rack [of comics.] And then they stopped selling them, and I actually didn’t have access to them for a while, until I got to college. I was thinking about this recently—we were at the Chicago Comic Con, and someone was talking about how [the annual comic convention] Wizard World is held out in the suburbs, and because of that there’s a whole demographic of people who’ll never go to that show. But there’s so many different factors when it comes to how you get ahold of the goods. Access to technology. You have all these Web comics that people who don’t have direct access to technology will never get the chance to check out, unless they’re at the library.

A: And even then, it’s an uphill battle. Even people who have that access can’t seek them out if they don’t know they exist.

JJ: Yeah. That’s one of our hopes with this book—we hope it inspires new readers, young readers, to check out what’s out there, but we also want to inspire new creators from different, diverse backgrounds to actually start making comics and really thinking about how to express themselves through that medium. We like the idea of a little kid picking up this book, just being blown away by the images, and being like, "Whoa, this is great—I can do this kind of thing."

**There’s another interesting quote in the book from the artist Jiba Anderson: "To a certain extent, the African-American community does not quite buy the concept of the superhero." Why do you think that is? **

JJ: The idea of what the superhero traditionally represents, to a certain degree, is outside the purview of what’s accessible to African-Americans. Traditionally, the political standpoint of black people in America has been that of the outsider, the "other," y’know? Also, I think that particular statement is about the idea of justice not necessarily based on equality, or meritocracy.

DD: I think it’s about the idea of the superhero as someone who maintains the status quo. "Truth, Justice and the American Way" doesn’t always include black people the way it should. Superheroes don’t go and work in the community or anything like that, and I think that’s part of what [Jiba] was saying—that that’s why black people feel distanced from the idea of the superhero, in some ways.

JJ: Or even disenfranchised by the idea of the superhero, because the superhero reinforces particular belief structures about the nature of being black. And the nature of being white, for that matter. I really love superhero comics. I grew up reading them, but I think the nature of the stereotype, or the nature of those particular representations, are just inherently limiting to a certain degree.

It’s interesting that the comics characters who’ve become part of black pop culture aren’t necessarily black characters. You don’t see rappers referencing Cage or Black Lightning; instead you get Ghostface Killah calling himself "Tony Starks," after Iron Man’s civilian identity, and MF Doom referencing Dr. Doom, the Fantastic Four villain.

JJ: And if you think about it, the very first rap song, by the Sugarhill Gang, referenced Superman, right? I think it’s about accessing those particular modes of power. I think there’s a natural connection between those types of braggadocio rap songs and the nature of the superhero itself. If you think about it, the gangsta rapper is a superhero. 50 Cent and all those characters—the very physicality of the gangsta rapper is kind of a superhero physicality. I think it’s a natural part of being male in our society. Will Eisner said—I’m paraphrasing—that as long as there are boys trying to figure out what it means to be men, there are going to be superheroes of some kind. And as an African-American male, growing up in a society where you’ve been to a certain degree degraded, or treated as insignificant or invisible, you gravitate toward these larger-than-life characters even more.

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DD: I think there’s also something about those characters being corporate icons. Being these super-representations of capitalistic power. Like Tony Stark has his mansion and his corporation and everything. Dr. Doom rules a country with an iron fist—literally. That kind of power attracts rappers—not all rappers, obviously, but a certain kind of rapper. They’re very much these consummate capitalists—"I’m going to have more money than you, I’m going to own everything, and I’m going to have this power that’s been taken away." I think economics plays into it, for sure.

JJ: You can see it in that Wu-Tang Clan song, "C.R.E.A.M."—"Cash rules everything around me."

**I wanted to bring up Wu-Tang. You can tell from the references in their lyrics that a lot of those guys grew up reading comics, and their records are full of these insane kung-fu gangster Mafia stories, which you’d think would lend themselves really well to a comic-book treatment, but they’ve tried to make Wu-Tang comics and they’re pretty terrible. **

DD: Yeah. It’s really interesting and innovative when they mash up comics as a genre in their music, but when people try to move it over to comics I don’t think they really think about being innovative with comics as a medium. About pushing what you can do with, like, panel structure and artwork. I think one of the best hip-hop comics I’ve ever read is MF Grimm’s Sentences. It’s not about hip-hop as a genre, it’s autobiographical, but it’s a really great book that really ties into hip-hop. Another one is Felt, by Jim Mahfood, where he took songs off the album Felt 2 by [underground rappers] Murs and Slug, and adapted the lyrics into these cool, tripped-out mini-comics. That was cool, because it was actually tied in more to the vibe of the music, the innovation the music was going for, rather than the surface trappings of comics.

**John, when you were growing up, were you conscious of the fact that there weren’t that many black characters in the superhero comics you were reading? **

JJ: I did find that I was collecting as many comics as I could that had black characters in them. It maybe wasn’t a conscious thing at the time, but I had a lot of Black Lightnings, and I was a really big fan of the Black Panther and stuff like that. I liked the Falcon a lot. But I had other expectations as far as representation—I was really attracted to characters like [the blind urban vigilante] Daredevil at first, and that was a class-based thing, because of his upbringing. I did notice that characters like [C-list Daredevil antagonist] Turk, these black thug characters, were pretty prevalent. But I wouldn’t say I was disappointed—I just really loved the stories. It wasn’t until I was a little bit older that I started looking for representations of people who looked like me.

**Poor Turk. Daredevil’s been beating him up once a month for forty years. **

JJ: Oh, Turk. You crazy, crazy guy.

DD: You’d think that dude would have learned his lesson by now. Gone into accounting or something.

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